Article

An exploration of how comments are used for marking related code fragments

Authors:

Annie T. T. Ying,

James L. Wright,

Steven AbramsAuthors Info & Claims

MACS '05: Proceedings of the 2005 workshop on Modeling and analysis of concerns in software

Pages 1 - 4

https://doi.org/10.1145/1083125.1083141

Published: 15 May 2005 Publication History

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Abstract

A software developer performing a change task to a system very often has to examine a concern that is scattered across the source code of the system. Although many mechanisms attempt to alleviate the problem of dealing with scattered code, many software developers are still using more ad-hoc approaches to mark related code. In this paper, we explore how developers use comments to mark related code. We found that developers use two basic kinds of conventions to mark related code in comments: by explicitly stating relationships in the comment and by using similar comments in related code elements. These conventions have several major issues. However, we observe that using comments to mark related code fragments offers several benefits. We hope that our observations can give insights into building better tool support for scattered code fragments.

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Index Terms

An exploration of how comments are used for marking related code fragments
1. General and reference
  1. Document types
    1. Computing standards, RFCs and guidelines
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software creation and management
    1. Designing software
      1. Software implementation planning
        Software design techniques
    2. Software development techniques
  2. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

MACS '05: Proceedings of the 2005 workshop on Modeling and analysis of concerns in software

May 2005

77 pages

ISBN:1595931198

DOI:10.1145/1083125

ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes Volume 30, Issue 4
July 2005
1514 pages
ISSN:0163-5948
DOI:10.1145/1082983
Issue’s Table of Contents

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 15 May 2005

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Index Terms

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